Blacks vs Jews, Baseball

This is the beginning of a new friendly competition between blacks and Jews. I'll pick a topic, then I'll choose a member of each community that fits the description, and finally I'll compare the two.

The best Jewish baseball player (forgive me Hank Greenberg and Ryan Braun in the future) of all time is Sandy Koufax. The best black baseball player of all time is Willie Mays. For today's contest we'll compare their numbers when facing each other. That will give us an objective winner.

Willie Mays batted .263 with 4 homers and 13 RBIs in 96 at bats against Sandy Koufax. That basically amounts to a tie. However, these stats are acording to Baseball-Reference.com, which hasn't accounted for the 1955 and 1956 seasons. Those were Koufax's first two seasons in the majors and he didn't fare well. He was 4-6 in 28 games and around 100 innings pitched. His ERA in 1955 was 3.02 and 4.91 in 1956. During the same period Mays hit .319 with 51 homers and 127 RBIs in 1955 and .296 with 36 homers and 84 RBIs. So Mays gets the edge there.

A fairer way to determine who wins is to look at other known stats, so we don't award a win based on guessing. Mays walked 23 times and only struckout 20 times against Koufax, no small feat. That puts Mays' on base percentage against Koufax at .407, which is quite good. His OPS against was .891 which is above average even today. Keep in mind that pitchers had the advantage during the era that they played, unlike today.

So the winner is Willie Mays.
Overall record: Blacks 1 Jews 0

Join me next time when the topic will be gay communists.